🐵 Humans are hardwired to copy others by evolution — for a good reason. Mimicking those around us has been the most efficient survival strategy for millions of years. However, the world is different today. We now live in an age of rapid change — what used to be efficient becomes a recipe for mediocrity and decay ☠️

🥂 Let 2025 be the year we rely on our own opinions — not imposed stereotypes and outdated thought patterns. Only by trusting our instincts and following our own unique paths can we fulfil our potential and make great contributions to the world 🎨

🎆 Have a happy and productive 2025, everyone! 🚩

💭 This is what the brightest minds of Silicon Valley are saying about The Open Network.

Peter Fenton, Partner at Benchmark:

📝 Telegram’s user base, which is expected to grow to over 1.5 billion through 2030, creates an unprecedented opportunity in the history of humanity to provide ubiquitous financial flows that have been limited until now to information flows, TON provides the backbone for human-scale democratization of financial activity.📝

Micky Malka, Founder at Ribbit:

📝 Ribbit partners with exceptional teams tackling and solving the world’s biggest problems. TON and Telegram exemplify this, working together to expand financial access globally by coupling the best technology with a seamless consumer experience.📝

Tim Draper, Founder of Draper Associates:

📝 I’ve been a long-time believer in the potential of blockchain to disrupt traditional industries and systems. TON’s technology is highly impressive, and its integration with Telegram provides it with a distribution that no other blockchain can match.📝

Shaun Maguire, Partner at Sequoia Capital:

📝 The TON team is the best in the world at the intersection of consumer product thinking and crypto infrastructure. When you combine this with the global distribution of Telegram, we’re very excited to see where they go.📝

🔮 I know only a few people who can spot technology trends as sharply as Peter, Micky, and Tim — and most of the others have also invested in TON. I haven’t met Shaun from Sequoia yet, but from everything I’ve heard, he’s just as visionary as the rest of this stellar group of investors 💫

📰 Yesterday, a French newspaper claimed that my detainment in France last summer ‘finally’ forced Telegram to comply with European rules. This is false. Telegram has always been compliant with EU laws. 🇪🇺

👮‍♂️ After last August, it was the French police that finally started to ‘comply with European rules’ — by sending their requests to Telegram in the legal way described by the EU’s Digital Services Act. As a result, French courts have been able to receive IP addresses of criminal suspects from Telegram. 🧑‍⚖️

🌐 The information about this legal way to reach us could be obtained on our apps, website or just by googling ‘telegram eu police’ — long before my detainment in France. Why the French courts and police had been ignoring this process clearly defined by EU law is still a mystery to us, but it’s unfair to say that Telegram somehow ignored European rules. Paradoxically, it was French law enforcement that for some reason had been ignoring them. 🤔

🇫🇷 I love France and respect its police force, so I didn’t want to embarrass anyone by pointing out the above. But I cannot ignore when such obvious misinformation about Telegram is spread. 🙅‍♂️

🥈 Telegram is the 2nd most popular messaging app in the world. We spend millions of dollars every year to ensure our compliance with laws across the globe. In the EU in particular, we always start preparing to comply with laws years before they even come into force. 🗓

😲 Last month, France nearly banned encryption. A law requiring messaging apps to implement a backdoor for police access to private messages was passed by the Senate. Luckily, it was shot down by the National Assembly. Yet 3 days ago the Paris Police Prefect advocated for it again. 🤦‍♂️

The members of the National Assembly were wise to reject a law that would have made France the first country in the world to strip its citizens of their right to privacy. Even countries that many Europeans view as lacking in freedoms have never banned encryption. Why?

Because it’s technically impossible to guarantee that only the police can access a backdoor. Once introduced, a backdoor can be exploited by other parties — from foreign agents to hackers. As a result, the private messages of all law abiding citizens can get compromised.

Aimed at preventing drug trafficking, the law wouldn’t have helped fight crime anyway. Even if mainstream encrypted apps had been weakened by a backdoor, criminals could still communicate securely through dozens of smaller apps — and become even harder to trace due to VPNs.

This is why, as I’ve said before, Telegram would rather exit a market than undermine encryption with backdoors and violate basic human rights. Unlike some of our competitors, we don’t trade privacy for market share.

In it’s 12-year history, Telegram has never disclosed a single byte of private messages. In accordance with the EU Digital Services Act, if provided with a valid court order, Telegram would only disclose the IP addresses and phone numbers of criminal suspects — not messages.

Last month, freedom prevailed. But it was a reminder: we must keep explaining to lawmakers that encryption isn’t built to protect criminals — it protects the privacy and safety of ordinary people. Losing that protection would be tragic.

The battle is far from over. This month, the European Commission proposed a similar initiative to add backdoors to messaging apps. No country is immune to the slow erosion of freedoms. Every day, those freedoms come under attack — and every day, we must defend them. 🛡